Gaming establishments, and in particular bingo halls, commonly use preprinted sheets of paper containing multiple bingo cards for sale to their customers. Of specific importance at present, and the problem which the present invention seeks to address, is that of the consumption of large quantities of paper as preprinted bingo cards. There are security concerns associated therewith, as well as purely environmental and economic concerns. See U.S. Pat. No. 5,687,971 to Khaladkar for further background.
Conventional paper bingo cards are thrown away after each game, since they are not reusable. Consumption of paper and ink makes up a large expense for bingo operators. For example, it is my understanding that approximately 52 million sheets of 11.times.17 inch bingo paper are used in the Province of Saskatchewan alone each year, which seems to equate to about 52 semi-trailer loads. Buying this paper represents a significant cost to bingo operators, not to mention the financial and environmental costs of the disposal of same once used. If the amount of paper used could be reduced ,the costs of operating a bingo would be positively affected.
Bingo establishments commonly have thousands of sheets of bingo paper "in inventory" at any one time. Many attempts have been made to lessen the cost and security risks associated with the holding of such inventory, with varying degrees of success.
It has been recognized that laminated paper and soluble marking ink might be employed rather than normal newsprint-type bingo paper, which would allow for the reuse of bingo cards. The use of a laminated paper with a fast-drying but soluble ink could lessen the consumption of paper considerably and lower the costs both to the operators and to the environment. Rather than moving about the bingo hall selling additional sheets of bingo paper between every game bingo workers could instead collect used cards for cleaning and sell cleaned cards or revalidate cards for replay in the system once a player used up the cards that they bought when they started.
Preferable to the cleaning of the sheets or gaming cards by the players at their tables, which would be messy, would be to have a large enough stock of reusable laminated bingo cards that used cards could be removed for cleaning elsewhere in the facility and clean cards could simply be sold.
The Khaladkar invention addresses many of the concerns of security and validation associated with the use of reusable card stock. The problem which the present invention seeks to address, however, is the need for an efficient method of wiping the used bingo cards clean. The number of sheets of cards which would be in play at any one time would mean that to manually wipe them clean would take significant manpower. This would seem to be one of the only limitations to the broad deployment of laminated reusable bingo paper in the gaming industry.